DICE Summit 08 had much to offer with the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, BioShock, and The Orange Box came home as big winners, garnering four awards each.

Individual achievements by Mike Morhaime and Ken Kutaragi were also recognized by The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. Details in the full article.

It seems safe to say that World of Warcraft and the PS2 are still some of the best bits of gaming you can find anywhere. The Nielsen Company agrees wholeheartedly, as their Top 10 lists attest.

The Nielsen Company recently came out with their Top 10 lists for 2007, and according to their research, WoW happens to be the king of PC gaming and the PS2 is the king of consoles. For the full story, click on "Read More" to know more.

Some analysts are adopting an optimistic outlook towards the recent announcement from Activision and Vivendi Games of their merge into Activision Blizzard. One such analyst, Piers Harding-Rolls, gives a few good reasons why. Hit the full article to check it out.

 

Tired of staring at exhibits of the evolution of man in your local museum? Try this: the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's Economic Adventure Gallery is hosting a new exhibit on the history of video games at the Guildhall of Southern Methodist University (SMU), a leading education center for digital-game development. Entitled "Video Games Evolve: A Brief History from Spacewar! to MMORPGS", the exhibit traces the evolution of video games from 1962 to the present day.

While the SMU exhibit does examine the roots of the video game industry with the birth of Spacewar! in 1962 (a playable demo of which is available at the exhibit), it also features the classic arcade games of the 1980s (Pac-Man, Space Invaders, etc.), educational games like the Federation of American Scientists' Immune Attack, and even modern MMORPGs such as Sony Online Entertainment's Star Wars Galaxies and Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

The aptly-named Dr. Peter Raad, Executive Director of the Guildhall at SMU, commented that:

This is a wonderful exhibit not only for video game lovers, but for anyone who wants to know how science, technology, and art come together to form an industry.

The exhibit will run until January 2008. And by the way, the playable demos are all free.

Headplay is probably every couch potato's dream. Imagine a TV. Now imagine being able to take it anywhere and everywhere you go (except perhaps in the shower), and being able to watch movies or play games on it anytime you want. That's the concept for the new "Personal Cinema System" device, Headplay.

Headplay is a head-mounted device; basically, a TV you wear on your head. You can connect it to your gaming consoles, your DVD Player, your iPod, your PC, and maybe your Betamax player if it hasn't choked on dust yet. If it has a video out function, Headplay can most probably display it. You can also plug in a memory stick and Headplay can run the media files - movies, videos, and images - with its own built-in player.

Once you're behind the lenses of Headplay it's pretty easy to just relax and go dead to the world around you. It's nothing but you and the screen, with the stereo sounds blocking off everything else. It's like your own movie screen inside your living room.

To read the complete review of Headplay - what it is, what it does, how it plays on Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and Nintendo' Wii on it - click on the link for the full article.

(Editors Note: Welcome to our 9th ish! I won't be spoiling anything here, dig on all the news below. One request though: Quickjump QuickPeek is here to stay, and we would appreciate any kind of ideas you have on improving it. Are four articles per blog enough? How should we select top stories? Do we need polls for the comment of the week? Do tell us!)

New week, new breakthroughs, new issue. The last week was one of the most monumental so far, so if you've missed checking our sites, you're a goner. Nah, we're just messing with you. That's what QuickJump QuickPeek is for, to provide you guys with the week's top events. Sure, nothing beats being among the first to read about newsbreakers once they hit our pages, but the QuickPeek experience is close enough. On to this week's issue!

The full issue awaits after the jump!

Want to see how games fare in the land down under? Games Industry GfK Australia gives you the skinny on what games wins the Aussie's hearts - and wallets - with its list of Australia's top-selling games for the first half of this year. In this list not Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo wins the top spot, as it is now owned by an expansion of the epic online game: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

The list clearly shows that the perennial PS2 is still going strong down under, with about 5 entries in the charts, including Final Fantasy XII. Sony snagged the half of the top ten slots, and for a country which gets the PS3 at a very expensive price (estimated to be about US$ 900), two games still managed to snag the 6th and 7th slots: Resistance Fall of Man and MotorStorm, respectively.

Nintendo, however, is the overall winner in dominating the entire chart with about 8 games making it into the Top 20. It's cute doggie simulation, Nintendogs: Dachshund and Friends, also found a place in Aussie's hearts and was able to hang on the 20th spot in the list.

As for Microsoft, it only had one entry in the whole chart: Gears of War, which landed on the 14th spot.

The winning Burning Crusade expansion also propelled sales of World of Warcraft, with the original game landing in a very comfortable 5th place.
Check out the numbers:

1. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, PC
2. Final Fantasy XII, PS2
3. Pokemon Diamond, Nintendo DS
4. God of War 2, PS2
5. World of Warcraft, PC
6. Resistance: Fall of Man, PS3
7. MotorStorm, PS3
8. Nintendogs: Dalmatian and Friends, Nintendo DS
9. Cricket 07, PS2
10. The Sims 2: Seasons, PC
11. Guitar Hero 2 bundle, PS2
12. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Nintendo Wii
13. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, Nintendo DS
14. Gears of War, Xbox 360
15. Pokemon Pearl, Nintendo DS
16. SingStar Rocks! bundle, PS2
17. The Sims 2: Pets, PC
18. Nintendogs: Labrador and Friends, Nintendo DS
19. New Super Mario Bros., Nintendo DS
20. Nintendogs: Dachshund and Friends, Nintendo DS

(Welcome to the first issue of QJ.NET's weekly feature, QuickJump QuickPeek! This weekly-updated spot will run the top news of the past week, think of it as your own directory of sorts to the week's news breakers in our second home we like to call video gaming industry. This page could contain something as trivial as Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft bigwigs gathering together for an afternoon teaparty or as groundbreaking as that teaparty turning into a free for all, take-out-as-many-gaming-execs-as-you-can brawl. With that, we take you to this week's mover and shakers...)

We weren't treated to news of filthy rich gaming execs going at each others' throats this week, but we did have an equally gory debacle with the Manhunt 2 and Red Ring of Death bad rap. There's also the groundbreaking release of PSP homebrew hero Fanjita's Illuminati exploit (via Lumines UMD) that later on brought us the highly anticipated 3.50 downgrader. Throw in the talks about Nintendo's WiiWare and the PS3 firmware update and we have a really interesting week. Now for the QuickJump quick peek to the week's top stories...

The QuickJump QuickPeek awaits after the jump!

 

Okay, this may cause some alarmists to scream "Big Brother!" so before all the speculation, here are the known details - just so all you privacy advocates can relax a bit.

Google has filed a patent that reveals that they plan to compile psychological profiles of millions of gamers by covertly monitoring the way they play online games. Now you may think that this only concerns folks who play MMOs on their PCs, however, the patent apparently says that Google can also monitor people playing on any game console that hooks up to the internet, including the Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, and Microsoft Xbox 360.

What's even more hair-raising is that it says that information could be retrieved from previous game details saved on memory cards. To quote: "Such saved information may be thought of state information, and offers a valuable source of information to the advertisers." Yes, if you've played 350 hours of Oblivion, they'll know. Yep, the patent is that creepy; it even says:

In a car racing game, after a user crashes his Honda Civic, an announcer could be used to advertise by saying 'if he had a Hummer, he would have gotten the better of that altercation', etc... If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for Pizza Hut, Coke, coffee.

Now here's why we're asking all those privacy advocates to calm down and not cry foul. Google has said that they do not plan to roll out the technology in the near future. They say that it was just one of the patents that they wanted to file. The Guardian reports that a Google spokesman had this to say: "Google registers different patents irrespective of whether we actually intend to use them."

So no, Big Brother, er, I mean, Google isn't watching you. Not yet. *insert cheesy B-movie sci-fi music* It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

In an exclusive interview with Sony Online Entertainment's David Christensen, new vice president of business development and international operations, Next-Gen was able to extract SOE's desire to trace Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft and deliver an MMO champ to be remembered by. Their first order of business was to establish an international footprint.

So while keeping a firm hand on Europe and North America, Sony Online Entertainment glanced over to the other half of the world and saw how much work lay waiting for them.

South America, India, Vietnam and the Philippines were just some of the names mentioned by Sony, after they identified the most active countries where MMO gamers would love to try out new games given the chance

But of course, Sony does have its share of competition. So far, Korean development companies have been also successful with their own local products that had taken Asia and parts of the West by storm. Trying to insert a viable product in the same market to compete with tried-and-tested (and free for the most part) MMOs would prove unnervingly difficult.

Hakkyu Kim's Granado Espada (Sword of the New World) is one such title that has just recently been tapped into by the Asian market following the recent announcement of a closed beta program. It's been gaining amazing foothold on most Asian countries and could become a brilliant Asian WoW by itself.

But Christensen is still keeping positive, claiming that they do have an ability to enter the local markets and not "be competing with several hundred MMOs" that gamers are already hooked into. SOE is currently trying to establish relations with key entertainment and online technology companies.

They already have games in Taiwan, China and Korea, but Christensen remains adamant that it's just "a very small footprint" they they have established on foreign markets. Is it safe to say that the world MMO market should be seeing Sony branded MMO games coming to other countries soon? With Sony's premier focus on catering to low-cost local economies, you could say that.